...Mr. Dreyer has a lot of useful information to impart ... One encounters wisdom and good sense on nearly every page of Dreyer’s English. The whole chapter on fiction should be bound and issued to all MFA students. But part of the fun of the book, for me, was silently yelling at Mr. Dreyer on this point or that and writing a big 'NO!' in the margin ... Benjamin Dreyer has a style. It is playful, smart, self-conscious and personal, highlighted by admirable lines ... Sometimes, however, he crosses over into the Land of Twee ... But I’d hold my fire on the rest. After all, it’s his book.
Dreyer himself is a charming, chatty narrator with a soft spot for both digressive footnotes and name-dropping. He dislikes scare quotes and lauds parentheses for their 'conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness.' He is just persnickety enough ... The emphasis on grammar as a tool for self-expression, not just communication, feels evocative of an era in which online dogmatists periodically go scorched earth on punctuation marks or parts of speech that offend their sensibilities ... Dreyer beckons readers by showing that his rules make prose pleasurable ... His book is in love with the toothsomeness of language. Its sentences capture writing’s physicality ... He takes a tinkerer’s joy in breaking apart syntax and putting it back together. Restrictive clauses are like Legos to him ... Dreyer’s attention to gusto in language use is magical in a way that resists full explication ... For Dreyer to wade into this process with news of pleasure is lovely.
Dreyer, Random House’s longtime copy chief, is funny and charming, delivering a style manual with a great deal of style ... Throughout the proceedings, Dreyer is simultaneously meticulous and unfussy, a winning combination and surely a byproduct of dealing with authorial egos for the better part of his adult life ... Dreyer’s tone is authoritative, yet relaxed and playful, with the presence of teacher that you do not fear, but do fear disappointing ... But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now ... What Benjamin Dreyer provides in Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style is the increasingly rare and refreshing public spectacle of a person caring about their job and doing it well ... Above all, [the book] is personal. Its basis, and the basis of Dreyer’s English, is a lifetime of thinking and caring deeply about something, a lifetime of giving a shit.
Dreyer is an expert grammarian and influential arbiter of good writing, whether in the novels he oversees as the copy chief at Random House, or on Twitter, where he points out the proper use of the em dash, commonly misspelled names (Olivia Colman), and that while it’s kosher to spell omelette as omelet, dialog is beyond the pale, 'Because ick.' This blend of pedantry and whimsy makes his new book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, an instructive and entertaining manual—one that lays down the law of the jungle while being imaginative enough to allow personal idiosyncrasy to prosper.
[Dreyer] really is an expert — vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House — but he’s more interested in sharing his love for great writing than in rapping anyone’s knuckles ... The result is a very useful style guide that’s also a delight to read. Dreyer believes in rules, and he explains them with admirable clarity. But he also believes most rules have exceptions — and that some shouldn’t even be rules ... Do not skip the footnotes. They’re often home to Dreyer’s cleverest snaps ... [Dreyer] lays out the rules, but it’s done in a spirit of compromise, of wanting to help people understand them with the aim of making everyone’s writing better.
... wonderful ... Throughout Dreyer’s English, the text in the footnotes is as captivating as in the body of the book ... Indeed, readers will not want to skim past a moment of this book ... One can only hope Dreyer had as much fun writing his own fucking book as his audience has reading it. One suspects he did. There is a conversational tone throughout the book that never ceases to convey the author’s appreciation and enthusiasm for the art of writing ... Dreyer’s English is a keeper; it can and should be referred to again and again so that the lessons, as with all good learning, become second nature ... Add Dreyer’s English to The Elements of Style and a select few books no writer should be without ... This is not a book to be missed. By anyone.
A writer-acquaintance of mine told me that Mr. Dreyer’s book is 'the only style guide I’ve ever read from cover-to-cover,' and that she bought several copies to give out this season as graduation gifts. It’s that kind of book. Until one has read it completely from cover-to-cover, it seems unlikely that anyone would think to consult it as a proper how-to resource; only then, recalling that Mr. Dreyer had something incisive to say on the difference between affect and effect, say, or the slippage of the word sanction to mean both to allow and its exact opposite, would one turn to it for reassurance.
User-friendly ... While the manual is invaluable for the author-to-be, it’s also an advantageous read for anyone looking to avoid sounding like an idiot in any official document, regardless of whether they have a background in or penchant for writing ... peppered with Dreyer’s playful anecdotal footnotes and acerbic wit, making for a riotous read when readers wouldn’t necessarily expect one ... A remarkably fun book about a dastardly dry subject, this will surely aid in committing the rules of the written word to memory, once and for all.
Dreyer promises to reveal 'some of the fancy little tricks I’ve come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better', and does so with accuracy, style, and a humour that is slightly relentless ... Here we go again with the old spectre of logocentrism – the belief that speech is more authentic than writing. Prose that can easily be read aloud on the first try is the kind of frictionless, conversational writing that makes no demands on the reader, which is fine for certain applications and depressingly unambitious for others ... On grammar, Dreyer has clearly expressed opinions, even if they run against the modern grain ... It is a shame, at least, to see him take a mansplaining swipe at Alanis Morissette and her song 'Ironic' by claiming 'Rain on your wedding day is not irony' ... The book peters out in the kinds of padding common to this genre: advice on what to do with numbers and foreign phrases, how to spell the names of celebrities, and that mysterious old standby, the list of commonly confused words ... Much as you might disagree with some of Dreyer’s preferences, you can’t help warming to a writer who has become this attuned to nuances of meaning, and even spelling.
Unlike, say, Chicago, you can read Dreyer’s English right through with unalloyed enjoyment, and learn a lot from it: not only from its rulings but from its attitude. Sane, tetchy, prankish and intensely pragmatic, Dreyer tells you how a good copy-editor thinks, how he finds compromises, and – above all – what close attention he pays ... Benjamin Dreyer is wise and bitterly experienced and fantastically good company. You should buy his book and read it and, if you’re British, ignore everything he has to say about the relationship between commas and quotation marks. But if you’re American, you may just have to suck it up.
In general, then: I like this book very much; it is sound and funny and useful; I have already recommended it to many students and friends and will continue to do so ... I have two reservations: Dreyer never mentions his most obvious debt, to The Elements of Style. My other reservation is kin, perhaps, to the first, and has to do with tone ... Though long, and a little baggy, the book is well designed for browsing ... Dreyer sometimes slides into a pomposity that is no improvement; just look at his book’s title. His English, indeed ... what, after all, can one make of seven dense pages of acknowledgments but to conclude that the writer has seized the microphone at his own imaginary Oscars ceremony, refusing the prompt of the travelling-music designed to get him offstage?
Dreyer has fun throughout, exhibiting a light tone and a sly sense of humor ... A pleasant voyage with a genial, worthy captain—though we do sail to many places we have been before.
A splendid book ... Dreyer’s most effective material comprises his recollections of working with authors ... This work is that rare writing handbook that writers might actually want to read straight through, rather than simply consult.
